Last chance to sign up for the (lottery? raffle?) chance to win a free ride to the edge of space on the XCOR Lynx spaceplane. To win you have to attend the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, and you have to have an experiment. The best I can come up with on the spur of the moment would be to use the payload capacity of the Lynx to loft a high-performance upper stage, to launch an inert payload to as close to orbital velocity as possible, and test re-entry capability. My personal choice for re-entry vehicle? Khalid Sheik Mohammad. One thing we *all* want to know is “what happens to a human sans re-entry heat shield when de-orbited over the middle east?” and this seems like a good opportunity to find out.

So if you win the ride, feel free to use my experiment idea. I’d be happy to consult.

XCOR Aerospace and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) announce the final week to register and become eligible to win a suborbital research flight on XCOR’s Lynx I vehicle at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC-2012) in Palo Alto, CA on February 27-29. The deadline for early conference registration and for entering the drawing is the 10th of February at nsrc.swri.org.

Oh, boy! Who wants to fill up your tank of stupid today? The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement NBC News is actually promoting this rubbish. These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars. The […]

The Falcon Heavy is an absurdly low-cost heavy lift rocket F9H in reusable configuration (payload seems to be about 40 tones to LEO) costs $90 million. Fully expendable (64 tons to orbit), it’s $150 million. That sounds like a lot. It’s certainly more than I can afford. But compare it to the competition. The Delta […]

From Those Were The Days… currently on eBay is a truly impressive piece: Douglas Aircraft Co 1960’s Skeletal Wood Model of the C-5 Cargo Proposal LARGE The Buy-It-Now price is a substantial fifteen grand. It shows the internal structure of the Douglas proposal of the CX-HLS, what became the C-5, at fairly large scale. More […]

The Daily Caller points out something obvious: According To The FBI, Knives Kill Far More People Than Rifles In America – It’s Not Even Close As could be expected, after the Parkland school shooting the Civilian Enfeeblement Movement has been freshly reinvigorated. Kids are being used to emotionally agitate for the latest round of gun […]

A tracking website: Where is Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster with Starman? The “Chart” page has an overview of planetary positions w/Roadster that you can view into the future using a slider. Plus… available on Amazon:

This headline is a couple years old, but, wow: German government plans to spend 93.6 billion euros on refugees by end 2020: Spiegel That works out to roughly 20 to 25 billion Euros per year to deal with a problem without actually trying to *end* the problem. Thus it seems that 20 billion euro per […]

“Black Panther” seems like it makes some people a little passionate. Oddly, even though I’m not exactly a Marvel comics fanboy, I’ve caught every Marvel comics movie since “Iron Man” on opening day. Until “Black Panther.” Somehow I seem to have missed that one so far. I think perhaps the excessively matronizing Admiral Holdo in […]

The NERVA nuclear rocket, studied throughout the sixties into the early 1970’s, would have been a great way to propel spacecraft. But a nuclear rocket is not the same sort of reactor as is generally designed for use in space to generate electrical power. A NERVA can produce *gigawatts* of thermal energy, energy which is […]

Well, this is multiple levels of disturbing: Scoop: Skirmish in Beijing over the nuclear football Apparently something a little less than entirely awesome may have occurred when Trump visited China back in November: a US military aide carrying the “nuclear football” was separated by Chinese security officers from the Presidential group. There was a physical […]

A few decades before the “X-Wing” configuration gained a measure of popularity, Hughes Tool Company made a detailed study of a somewhat similar concept, the “rotor/wing.” This was a three-bladed helicopter rotor attached to a large central lifting surface, either a circular disk or a triangular structure. The rotor was not turned the conventional way […]